Don’t get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.
The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply ‘there’ to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited ‘main’ areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you’d just wander in to while exploring.
The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
The “AI” companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.
Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.
The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them … not greater than the sum of their parts.
I think it could’ve been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome “over there” largely literally on land. The ice worm would’ve been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it’s been a while) could’ve been way cooler if it wasn’t for one biome “over there”, too.
I don’t know how much larger it’d need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would’ve gone a LONG way.
I think a large part of why everything was segmented is they released the game into EA way too early. It made it to where they had to have a ‘gating’ system where they could stop players from going to areas that weren’t developed out of finished yet. Overall this affected the maps flow, validating all your points there. Also completely agree with the voiced narrative. Part of what made Subnautica great was the silence. It gives more room for hearing the crazy sounds around you. Instead you had some chatty voice in your head that had commentary about every damn thing.
Eh I know what you mean from a development standpoint (remixing the map would be a huge effort), but I still find it a kinda’ copout excuse. I bet we’d be here heralding the design instead of lambasting it if they took the time to really mix the biomes together properly once they had the assets complete.
In fact, I remember some early early access games doing exactly that: basically having demos that were WAY different than the final product. Ugh I wish I remembered any names, though such effort in to game development was over a decade ago, when some companies still treated it like an actual art form instead of a money vessel…
Oh no I wasn’t excusing the behavior, quite the contrary. I’m saying the map sucked because they went into EA too early and didn’t put effort into changing the map for full release. I agree with you!
Yea, if only they had thrown in the extra effort! Maybe we’d be here heralding it as a worthy successor instead of identifying the low hanging fruit still on the branch. lol
I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
Ouch. I didn’t even know either were on the switch. Ironic that the first ran well because they had a good bit of performance issues with it in beta. Though mostly around efficiently streaming assets while moving around, which I’m sure a cart is much faster than old spinny HDDs.
It used to exist a long long time ago! It was the Club Penguin Rewritten Discord server! It was the most wholesome Discord Gaming server ever! But sadly that server was deleted shortly after Disney sent a cease and desist notice to the dev and made the UK Police arrest him when he didn't respond to that.
After the last decade or more of people complaining about greedy publishers forcing devs to release half-baked messes too early (Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky, etc), it feels like I’m living in a bizarro world to see so much criticism for a publisher delaying a game to (allegedly) make it better.
Subnautica 2 must be in a pretty dire spot for this to happen. I guess we’ll see as the story unrolls and early access comes eventually but I’ve met many successful people who stopped caring after they made it big (which is fine but then just quit) so I really wouldn’t be surprised if the publisher is right here.
Yeah. If this is a case of “publisher buys out studio, replaces leadership, runs game into the ground” or “leadership of indie studio sells out, coasts on gold parachute, provides no leadership to the game’s dev team” or anything in between… The game won’t be good. It certainly won’t be good in early access. It’s an easy “skip unless it turns out to be completely mindbogglingly phenomenal on launch” for me. A downgrade from its prior status of “the only thing that’ll prevent me from buying this after early access is if it’s complete dogshit”.
I’m not ruling anything out at this point. It could be a classic case of a greedy corporation pushing out the real artists in order to exploit the art. It could be that the devs (specifically the 3 guys involved in the lawsuit) got lazy after they got paid. It could be both, neither, something else entirely. Honestly with how things go these days I’m just grateful there hasn’t been anything distasteful enough tl give me qualms about playing Subnautica.
I keep my feed on top 6 hours so don’t always see your posts. Every time I do though it makes me happy and feel grounded. I had a different account earlier but I remember when you first started and these have been a regular part of my online experience ever since
I enjoy doing these! It gives me something to look forward too at the end of the day and i’ve seen some people say they like the different feel of these which makes me happy to see them enjoying it
Oh no I no longer can play the incredibly toxic matchmaking multi-player games and instead have to enjoy the automation, exploration, story, management and strategy games I’ve always loved
Hmm should I try different party combos in BG3 to see how the dialogue changes or run around a COD map getting shot in the back of the head every 9 seconds while ads for mtx strobe flash my corneas?
Feel kind of lucky. They weren’t so toxic when I was good. The only place to really find that was from the notorious Xbox Live kids experimenting with their first ever swear words.
It was when gaming reached a broader audience and wasn’t just for “nerds” that toxicity became commonplace. Went from making friends with strangers all the time to just default muting mics and avoiding communities.
Nowadays, the less reflex-deoendent, the more you’ll be surrounded by players from those days and the less toxicity. Compare HLL to MW, for example.
As always, the closer a game gets to being a full blown simulator, the older the playerbase tends to be.
Almost like arcady bs with autoaim and automatchmaking and very short game round times and superhuman movement capabilities appeal to people with poor impulse control.
… of course you can then go way, way too far into fullblown sim territory and end up with actual geriatrics and/or turboautists, lol.
(I say this lovingly as a turboautist who has spent probably an unhealthy amount of time in various niche sim communities, lol)
Kind of. Growing up playing Counter-Strike and Battlefield titles, toxicity was still a much rarer thing than these days. Hell, smacktalk wasn’t even a thing unless playing with friends and joking around.
Hrm, I encountered plenty of toxic assholes back on CS and BF/42/Vietnam/2, to the point that I had to explicitly seek out better communities, and then landed at Project Reality, being an alpha/beta tester / gameplay design concept discussion enthusiast (lol) with them for years.
Maybe I just had worse luck back then, or maybe its just way, way worse now with modern casual shooters.
Could be a bit of both.
…
I still remember the final test before PR 0.5 was released.
DBzao had written the first iteration of the injected python script that was to govern how you could request which kits depending on which squad you were in, who had what kits in your squad, how many kits were available to your whole team, etc.
Problem was… sometimes, for a completely indiscernible reason… some players just couldn’t use the system at all.
We spent 3 hours in TS … or maybe it was Ventrilo?.. we spent hours trying everything we could think of, could not identify any pattern.
As the session was being wound down, as we had basically given up… I had a realization.
I pulled up the in game scoreboard… many times.
I then started barking orders at various remaining players to see who could and could not use the kit system.
If a non alphanumeric character was in your username, you could not use the kit system.
DBzao didn’t believe this at first, pulled up his code, and then screamed.
… yep, he hadn’t properly handled strings or string conversions or special characters at some stage of the code.
We’d been stuck on this for almost 2 weeks, and 6 hours later, it was fixed and released.
The controls and game mechanics tend to be so complicated that… well, people tend to have more realistic expectations from their teammates, and if you find a decent community, people tend to be more mature and friendly.
It actually requires a part time job level of commitment to be an exceptional shooter or tanker or pilot or even medic if you’re playing with a sufficiently complex health simulation… so, somewhat true to life, people tend to specialize and thus have much, much more incentive for decent communication standards.
Downside: Also true to life, a lot of games will end up feeling like 90% camping/hiking/road trip, punctuated, often essentially randomly, by 10% sheer terror.
…
You are not authorized for retirement unless you want a dishonorable discharge, soldier! If you need a wrist splint and vertical ergonomic mouse to continue your duties, check the nearest supply depot! Dismissed!
Those are pretty much the most commonly played milsims, with tons of available mods and dlc, huge expansive maps, players have their own inventories, can customize your whole load out and such…
SQUAD is sort of a milsim lite, maybe? It evolved out of Project Reality for Battlefield 2, they eventually made their whole own game in Unreal.
It retains the round based, class base core concept, but greatly expands on the more arcady nature of the Battlefield series with many more realistic gameplay concepts, much of them revolving around playing a role in a squad.
The maps aren’t as big as Arma, but you can still end up with a whole game session taking an hour or two.
There are also other games that basically aim for what SQUAD does, but not in a modern combat setting, Hell Let Loose for WW2 as an example.
I think Gray Zone Warfare is trying to be a new sort of milsim on the block, but so far I’ve heard roughly mixed reviews of it… and there are tons of ‘tactical shooters’… but they tend to be smaller in scope and usually lack vehicles, or don’t include near as many, or simulate them as extensively… and a whole lot of them tend to be developed by basically people who vastly overestimate their ability to make a game, and can be very toxic / in denial about this… so be careful with those, haha, probably check youtube for some reviews before diving in.
There’s also Gunner Heat PC if you want a very tank oriented tank sim, and DCS if you want an excruciatingly detailed, combat oriented flight sim, and you also hate money, lol.
Oh right, for basically most of these, you’re probably going to want to try and find and join some kind of larger community on discord or something like that… usually they’ll have guides, tutorials, plan matches/games on a schedule, maybe even offer some kind of psuedo boot camp / training for enthusiastic noobs, hehe.
I have never been good in FPS when it comes to “both jump around the corner and shoot, who wins?” But i have always been good at: “Where the heck did he come from?! what is this stupid play, this is not the meta!!!” happily frustrating some tryhards. As i get older i can still enjoy that way of playing.
It’s frustrating because I feel like my skills are actually still improving and better than they used to be but there’s always some 11 yo kid who will absolutely wreck me over and over again to the point where I just quit out of shame.
Honestly, as long as you’re still having fun and enjoying game, I don’t see an issue here. Sure, in some areas it might have gotten difficult, but if you’re able to adjust
Day 360 of sticking with anything is impressive. Thanks for sticking with this and posting content for us to consume. I appreciate it and hope you have something special planned for your anniversary.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne